Beneath Our Feet
Library Street Collective
May 31, 2025 – Jul 30, 2025
Library Street Collective is pleased to present Beneath Our Feet, a two-person exhibition with LaKela Brown and Mario Moore. Bringing together a mix of painting and sculpture, the pair of artists collaboratively examine the symbolic intersections of land, economic agency, and narrative authorship.
Brown and Moore both hail from Detroit, a city whose legacy of industry, labor, and cultural production deeply informs each artist’s distinct practice. In Beneath Our Feet, they reflect on the wealth held in the earth beneath us—and the enduring question of who holds the rights to till, own, and shape that land. Through materially rich processes and symbolically layered imagery, they consider land not just as property, but as history, inheritance, and possibility. While their reflections speak broadly to the Black American experience, they are simultaneously rooted in Detroit’s local terrain, where stories of migration, ownership, and resilience are embedded in the landscape.
Brown’s sculptural reliefs recall ancient modes of visual storytelling, such as hieroglyphic carvings or cuneiform tablets, while drawing on imagery rooted in 1990s hip-hop culture. In her latest works, she centers subjects of deep personal and cultural resonance—often objects familiar to her family that have long been excluded from formal art contexts—as a way of locating herself and her community within the art historical canon, advancing a visual language that is both accessible and affirming. Like Brown, Moore’s paintings brim with objects significant to the Black diaspora, from watermelon, emblematic of the economic agency of Black men in the Antebellum South, to hibiscus, a symbol of resilience. His new works draw on the tradition of Dutch and Flemish devotional painting—particularly garland paintings—redirecting reverence from religious icons to symbols of land, labor, and self-determination, and in doing so, inspiring a reconsideration of what society deems worthy of veneration today.
At the heart of the exhibition is The Smoke Coin, a striking 60-inch bas-relief coin, cast in bronze, collaboratively conceived by Brown and Moore, with each artist having developed one side of the sculpture. For his contribution, Moore has created a portrait of Brown, adorning her with door-knocker hoop earrings, cornrows, and a hoodie. Her profile echoes the conventional format of traditional American coinage, confronting the historic absence of Black women in national symbolism and positions of authority. On the opposite face, Brown depicts a bundle of collard greens—a recurring motif in her work that evokes memories of her grandmother, a lifelong chef, and the meals that shaped her upbringing. Arranged in a bouquet-like form, they serve as a signal of nourishment, and a poignant reminder of the vital interdependence within a community when existing societal systems fail to offer support.
A meditation on value, Beneath Our Feet prompts viewers to consider the foundations of our lives, both literal and metaphorical, and to imagine new systems of worth rooted in care, ancestry, and balanced power. Referencing time-honored methods, the creations of Brown and Moore serve as both technical showcases and acts of reverence.
Beneath Our Feet is on view at Library Street Collective from May 31–July 30, 2025 at Library Street Collective.
